D7: RIM: Wireless Apps Won't Be the Same As Wired Ones

Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO of Research in Motion said at the D7 conference that his company was working on new devices and new applications, but said people are seeing networks slow down today, so applications and devices had to be designed to work on the networks that will exist.

Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO of Research in Motion said at the D7 conference that his company was working on new devices and new applications, but said people are seeing networks slow down today, so applications and devices had to be designed to work on the networks that will exist.

"We're just at the beginning" of the movement toward smart mobile devices such as RIM's BlackBerry, Lazaridis said. He talked about BES 5.0 and how BlackBerries were now getting to be expected in corporate settings, and how the BlackBerry, led by the Pearl, now has 50 percent market share in the North American smart phone market. Conference host Walt Mossberg suggested that smart phone is the wrong name for these new products, and Lazaridis seemed to agree, saying it was a new computing platform that was very personal and that you carried with you.

RIM has been around for 25 years, and the first BlackBerry came out 10 years ago. In the beginning we had to disguise these products as pagers, but we always knew this was a new platform. There has always been competition, he said.

Mossberg pushed on the competitive landscape, but Lazaridis kept focusing on what the BlackBerry offered - what t he said was a platform that was "second to none" for corporate scalability, security, and email. He said it was easier to move from the corporate market to the consumer market than the reverse, for things like security. He talked about how the company has provided security and virtualization for years. He said the OS is the same for running the network, the OS, and the applications, with features such as multitasking; and has been for a long time. "We just don't promote the OS," he said.

Lazaridis was very clear RIM has had application download for a long time, and said 10 million people downloaded Facebook to their BlackBerry before there was an Appworld application store. But the new store has made it much more visible and easier for people to download more things.

Mossberg push him on what went wrong with the Storm, and Lazaridis disputed the notion, saying it was the third best selling product in North America (with the Curve in first place.) But he said RIM will keep making the Storm better and better, but "we're not afraid to try new things." He said the company was committed to SurePress and SureType.When asked about the tablet, he wasn't sure about the form factor, but said e-books were inevitable, as was convergence of multiple devices.

On the networks, Lazaridis talked about the importance of network scalability. He recounted how the original BlackBerry was designed to work on much older networks. In the current world, with every application using more bandwidth, he said the industry needed to design applications to conserve bandwidth. It takes the bandwidth of 100 to 1000 voice calls to stream video, he said. So he said it may be a mistake to expect the wired experience in a wireless world.

Instead, he said, applications should be optimized for the wireless network, with things like compression, proxies within the network or push email that needs to ask for data less often. But he said, the most important thing was that the experience had to be great for the customer.

When asked about malware, Lazaridis said he hadn't seen any on the BlackBerry yet, but talked about the importance of security as people start to use these devices for applications such as banking. He also said the company did North American manufacturing as part of the R&D process, but also used offshore manufacturing partners. He said the company was patient but committed to expanding BlackBerry in markets like India and China.

In the long run he said, devices would be more personalized; and the overall goal he said was "to delight our customers."

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